Preschool Corner- Thanksgiving and K!

Mmmmmm... I am feeling much better this week about where we are headed on our home pre-schooling journey!  I still have a lot of research and preparation to do, but now that I have taken a more relaxed approach and shifted our focus we are having so much more fun and I really feel that R-Man is absorbing a lot more.

I did more reading into Charlotte Mason this past week along with a good bit of blog hopping on the topic and found a WONDERFUL blog called Our Journey Westward!  This mama very closely mirrors what I believe our future homeschool experience will look like.  She has a strong emphasis on Charlotte Mason's methods while incorporating lots of unit studies and some classical education, which is exactly what I have been thinking about!  She lists so many wonderful resources on her blog- you really must check it out!

So what are our days looking like right now?  Well, we are working on establishing more of a routine.  I try to reserve Lion Cub's morning nap time (about 45 min- 1 hour) to solely focus on working with R-Man on "pre-school" things.  During that time this week we have been working on different components of his Thanksgiving lapbook (which I will be posting on next week), reading Thanksgiving books, and the letter K.

He is really coming along with his cutting skills and is even beginning to enjoy coloring and drawing with me (I never thought I would see the day!)!

Another fun project that R-Man and I embarked on this week was writing his very first book!  It is something I have been wanting to do with his for quite some time since he has such an active imagination and is always telling us the most hysterical stories!  So, we sat down and he dictated to me a whole story he called "A Lot of Spiders."  

And here it is for your reading pleasure (remember that he is only three and I tried to stay as true to what he told me as humanly possible!)!

A Lot of Spiders

by, R-Man

There were a lot of spiders going to get all the food.

By going on the floor and going to eat the food and going to go on my little chair.

They will bite big on my little chair.

Then they will bite bigger on the big chair and then they will bite all the chairs.

And there will be a big, big, giant chair and all the spiders will be eating it.  They will eat it all gone in their tummies and they will be really, really, really big!

All the spiders go up the loop and go to Canada and eat the food!

The End

I am debating over taking the story he wrote, tweeking it a bit so that the English flows better and he can hear the difference between the two, and adding graphics to turn it into a story book, but I am still not sure.  It is so pure and clearly written by a three-year-old so I will probably just leave it alone and let him learn as he grows.  It was a fun project though and I hope to do it more often!  I am hoping to prompt him into writing something about Thanksgiving this week!

Play-School

R-Man has really taken an interest lately in building things out of his foam blocks and legos!  I adore this type of play because I can totally see his wheels turning as he tries to figure out how best to stack and balance things to make them work!  He builds whole towns that he then drives his cars through and he loves using his semi-trucks and tractors to move the blocks around and haul them from place to place!  Of course he also loves that he is building things "like daddy!"

Life-School

In "Life-School" my husband and I are both putting a more concerted effort into instilling "habits" into R-Man and our whole family.  The habits we are working on are praying more throughout the day, memorizing scripture, reading the Bible together as a family, and Catechism.  I try to read a daily portion of scripture with R-Man during either breakfast or lunch everyday and we try to read whatever particular Bible story we are focusing on for the week (this week is Daniel and the Lion's Den) out of one of our children's Bibles right after dinner.  It has been great to see R-Man absorb these habits so quickly!  It amazes me how fast and well he is able to memorize verses, including the reference!

We are working on other "habits" with R-Man also- he likes to call them his "jobs."  He is responsible for taking his dishes to the sink after each meal, making his bed, putting his clothes in the laundry room and putting away the silverware out of the dishwasher.  He is doing a great job and is at a young enough age that these tasks actually seem fun!  Good by me- less work for mama!

It was a great week and I know it is only going to get better from here!